Midnight Passing
by Elizabeth Adalee
Summary: Each nasty word makes someone hate that much more. Each drop of blood brings someone closer to death. Each fallen tear brings someone closer to the edge.
1. Dark Jade

The small figure of a young boy with green eyes is a frequent sight at the library after hours, usually close to midnight. The little boy doesn't ever steal anything when he visits, he just sits curled up with a book, garnering and amassing information.

He is younger still, only ten though he looks about six years of age being very short and skinny, the result of severe malnutrition. If anyone were to see him with his shirt off, they'd be able to count his ribs from five feet away, albeit they would also see the gruesome marks scarring his porcelain skin.

His eyes were dark jade in color but they sparkled with an intelligence that was of one who had seen the horrors of the world. The little boy's name with the dark jade eyes and the too big clothes is Harold James Potter and though he is the lone savior of the wizarding world, he's been treated worse than a house elf for almost eight and a half years.

Bright eyes shine in the darkness of the cupboard under the stairs as Harry studies the little spider moving around not five inches away from his face. There is hardly enough room for a puppy in the cupboard let alone a little boy but Harry doesn't complain, he learned early on that it only made things a thousand times worse.

The spider is small and black and is relatively harmless and Harry is both content and curious as he watches the little spider build its web.

He knows that it's still a bit early in the morning so it will be a while before even his aunt woke up, calm in the darkness he let his breathing even out and drifted off to dreamland.


	2. Better To Forget

**A/N: All recognizable Harry Potter characters belong to J.K. Rowling and the Warner Brothers. I do not own Harry Potter. **

**Better To Forget**

"Freak! Get up! It's time to make my Duddykins breakfast!"

The shrieks of his Aunt Petunia and the banging on his cupboard door unpleasantly brings him back from the misery of his nightmares not even three hours after he falls asleep. Panicking, he scrambles to get up before his Uncle Vernon realizes that he isn't awake yet. Hearing many clicks on the door as his aunt unlocks the several locks trapping him inside his cupboard, he quickly exits his cupboard and heads into the kitchen to make breakfast.

Since he is so short, he has to use a stool to reach the stove. His aunt never offers him any help and he doesn't expect her to either.

Moving with grace that one wouldn't be expected at such a young age, he gets of all the ingredients out and turns on the stove. Any meal in the Dursley's house is always of a big quantity because of the amount that Vernon and Dudley Dursley eat, they are very overweight and unfortunately that gives them one more advantage over Harry every time they beat him.

He isn't strong enough to fight back.

By the time he finishes cooking he has set over 20 pancakes, 12 eggs, 15 sausages, 10 pieces of toast, and a pitcher of both milk and orange juice onto the table. However, even though Harry cooks all of that food for breakfast alone, on a good day all that he is allowed to eat is a piece on bread and one glass of water.

He has learned to ignore the hunger pains in his stomach long ago as he is forced to watch the Dursley's devour their food, Petunia is the only one at the table that ate a reasonable pace. Dudley sometimes just shoved the food into his mouth not even bothering with the silverware that was not even three inches away from his chubby hands.

When all the food is gone Harry picks up the dishes and cleans the kitchen twice before he is allowed to get dressed for school, his clothes and shoes are Dudley's old cast offs and the clothes hang off his limbs but he has learned not to care.

Over the course of ten years he has learned not to care about anything, especially not the humiliation of having to wear clothing five times his size.

Hurriedly he pulls his threadbare book bag onto his shoulders, also a hand me down of Dudley's, and quietly walks to the bus stop.

The ride to school is routine now, he sits isolated away from every other kid except Dudley and his friends/followers as they ridicule him and sometimes if the bus driver is distracted enough Dudley will get a few punches in before school.

The school is his safe haven, luckily he is in a different class than Dudley and his followers so he is free to divulge himself in the knowledge that his teacher presents to him. Harry is far more advanced than all the other children at primary school given the fact that he seems to soak in knowledge.

He is fluent both the foreign languages that the school offers as electives, French and German, and he is learning two other languages, Italian and Latin, from teachers who speak it and offered to teach him when they saw his eagerness to learn.

Harry is very proficient in maths and sciences and he reads more literature than the average high school student would. In conversations where his teachers don't think he's listening, he hears them throw words around like genius and prodigy but he doesn't pay them any attention. He is doing what he needs to do to ensure that he will get a scholarship to somewhere far away from Little Whinging.

It wasn't until his teacher, Ms. Melody, came up to him in homeroom and told him happy early birthday that he realized that his birthday would be in two months, during the coming summer.

He quietly thanked her before promptly forgetting about his birthday. He wouldn't get any special treatment from anyone; he didn't even think that the Dursley's remembered what month his birthday was in, they were so keen on forgetting he existed. It would be best if he just forgot about the whole affair.

The only thing that his birthday symbolized is the fact that he was one year closer to escaping.


End file.
